Bonhams

Issue 48, Autumn 2016

Editor's Letter: Lucinda Bredin "Artists are a different species from the rest of mankind. I know that's stating the obvious, but I was reminded of this eternal truth when reading Martin Gayford's piece about the life and loves of Max Ernst. Here was a painter who married four times  one of his wives was Peggy Guggenheim  and was at the inception of most of the major 20th-century artistic movements. I knew that he was at the starting gate with Dada and Surrealism; I didn't know he swung a bucket of paint over a canvas before Jackson Pollock. While curating an exhibition of female artists, Ernst chanced upon a young painter called Dorothea Tanning. It didn't take long before the pair shacked up together in Arizona. Two of the works that Ernst gave Tanning are being offered in New York's Modern and Impressionist Art sale in November and we can see that, despite changing women and continents, Ernst still felt an overwhelming urge to reinvent his work.

What artists get up to when they are not creating masterpieces has been much written about. In the case of British artists born between 1900 and 1970, the chances are that quite a chunk of downtime was spent at the Colony Room in Soho. On the face of it, this backroom in Dean Street didn't have much to recommend it. It was dingy, it smelt and the floor had an unnerving stickiness. But on the plus side, there was the chance to hear the acid repartee of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and other characters, among them the club's indomitable owner Muriel Belcher. As a curtain-raiser to an exhibition of works from the collection of Pallant House Gallery by the artists who drank there  Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and Michael Andrews were also habitués  Sophie Parkin takes us behind the scenes of the club where the only crime was to be boring.

It is often in straitened circumstances that artists reveal another aspect of their work. The film-maker, Andrey Tarkovsky, falls into this category with his revealing Polaroids taken of his family and friends while he was making his film, Nostalgia. It proved to be one of his last films and the photographs (an unlikely departure for him, as he had never taken a still picture before) reflect his rage against the dying of the light. These small masterpieces will be offered for sale in London in October.